Facebook and the rest of the Web 2.0 world have changed a lot of things, revolutionizing the way we communicate and how we maintain our social networks. To keep up, we are living dual lives. We constantly interrupt our engagement in the physical world that surrounds us by logging on to this massive other galaxy, accessed through the tiniest pieces of equipment and existing somewhere that no one has ever really been, a place where we remotely build and maneuver representations of ourselves.
There’s been a lot of talk about the social network side of this whole phenomenon. I spend more than enough time thinking about how to appropriately merge my real life exchanges with what are quickly becoming the social norms of the e-world. Should I “friend” that person I just met? If I friend him too soon, will he think I’m weird? If I wait, will he forget me?
Though at times eliciting confusion, the social functions of these relatively new internet communities are unfolding fairly straight-forwardly. But what about their impact on self-perception? Facebook and its step-child, Twitter, have changed the way I think about myself on a moment-to-moment basis. The Facebook “status” feature, the sole component of sites like Twitter, invites people to state not just what they are doing at that particular moment, but also what they’re thinking about, what they need people to know, and what they want people to wonder about.
This “status” indicator has disturbingly permeated my life. I find myself walking down the street thinking, “Mathilda is going to the grocery store. Mathilda is very pleased with her grades. Mathilda is so happy that winter is ending.” My thoughts, these very personalized bits (most of which I never utter), are transferred into the third-person for easy digestion by friends, colleagues, and lots of other people who I barely even know, whether I ever even post them on Facebook or not. By constantly conjugating my train of thought, I’m directing the timbre of my own self-perception for another audience.
And so it goes: Mathilda is thinking about Paris. Mathilda is avoiding the question. Mathilda wonders why we can’t just talk face-to-face.
I want to take a step back. What are all the things that we’re not saying on these sites? And for all the things we are saying, why are we so willingly and excessively disclosing them? This constant status update is part and parcel of the transformation of social networking and the reframing of communications into instant headlines, but how much does this venture into how we define ourselves individually?
Mathilda is walking home wondering.
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rambling on about nothing in particular, yet enlightening you nonetheless
We have multiple lives and inhabit them simultaneously. We cannot count the identities we enter and shed, apartments and villas rented and abandoned, whole houses with clothes left on hangers in closets...the records of where we docked, spent an afternoon or a decade.
-Kate Braverman
-Kate Braverman
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2 comments:
This "massive other galaxy" to which you refer is really made up of 1s and 0s, just as we are made up of cells that carry our DNA. So maybe these internet versions of ourselves are just as valid and real as the corporeal versions?
We humans are distinct from other species because of (among other characteristics) our highly developed verbal communication. We say things aloud. And equally important, we play with tone and pauses and gestures to say without saying. We have spent years experimenting with and perfecting speech and translating it into other mediums. Communication is different in 1s and 0s, but it's still communication, no matter how clunky it may occasionally seem. And it's evolving, just as our virtual selves are evolving. Facebook's "Mathilda is ______." was too constrained for the masses, as you may recall, so the "is" became optional.
"Mathilda is writing" can now be "Mathilda writes." "We is evolving" can now be "We are evolving." And in the most peculiar and fascinating ways.
The amount in which status updates permeate your life all depends on the way that people use these tools that are now readily available. Do I want to know about whether you're about to walk down to the grocery store or about to call a friend of yours? Probably not. Do I want to know if you found an interesting website that might be relevant to my life? Most likely.
I think the issue here is creating online social subgroups (in the way that you might with real friends). There are websites like Ravelry.com that are dedicated solely to knitters, or LinkedIn for professionals. I want information, yes. But not all information is important or relevant to me. That's why I try to surround myself and stay connected with people who have similar interests to me.
Internet aggregators and development platforms such as Facebook Connect are the wave of the future. It allows you to be involved in multiple communities, but maintain one persona. Much like you might play a sport, sing in a choir and work for a tech company. This allows you to stay connected with all of those people through one hub/identity and get information that's relevant to you.
This is why I don't follow thousands of people on twitter or friend thousands of people on facebook. At a certain point you have to put a filter down of "do I actually care?" That could be "do I care about what he has to say?" "do I care about his particular industry" or "do I care enough to add the extra 30 minutes of time to my life to keep in the loop?
We're not saying as much as we could, because we don't care enough to type it and we don't care enough to listen. The stuff that matters is the stuff worth typing and the stuff worth reading. When you first get twitter or facebook, you want to read everything and friend everyone because the idea is just so cool. Once that wears off you have to take a step back and figure out what matters to you specifically.
The internet has the power to create endless amounts of information, but we don't just need information. We need the right information.
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